Remember CD-ROMs? Those were the days, ey? You had to put a spinning disc in the front of your PC to install the games you physically bought and paid for. Actually, in the case of the Quake shareware CD-ROM, it was stuffed full of games you didn't buy, too.
That's according to Fabien Sanglard, who's written a blog post on the curious case of the Quake shareware CD release. The game itself took up a mere 22 MB of a CD-ROM's 640 MB capacity, leading John Carmack to joke that if there was ever a CD version of Doom, it would come with a "Making of Doom" feature film to use up the entire capacity.
However, it was decided that all that extra space could be put to better use instead—by including locked versions of id Software's entire back catalogue of games. The idea being, you could gain access to the games by calling a hotline, paying for them over the phone, and then putting in an unlock code. Just like you could when unlocking the shareware version of Quake into the full release.
English (US)